should have been “… ave a far lower rate of defects…”

showing definitively that I also need a copy editor.
{sigh}

– Scott

Most books at Mobileread are in the public domain, were edited way back when originally published, and have come through Project Gutenberg before being reformatted and posted on Mobileread. They are not unedited books.

I read a lot of free ebooks, usually self published. Some are good. Some authors clearly make an effort to clean up their writing and do a good job. It’s unfair and wrong to assume that all self published books are going to be bad.

I also buy Fictionwise multiformat books, and most of them don’t seem to be well edited either.

Should a badly written non-edited book cost the same as a professionally written and edited book? If they’re all together in the bookstores, how do you know the difference before buying? Right now it seems like if they are from big publishers they are most likely to have been well edited.

I am not sure ‘editing by crowd’ would work for fiction, of course. But I don’t think ‘the people’ are quite as useless as this editor thinks they are, and I agree that his post seems more about fear for his job than anything else.

Time Magazine (1980):
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922149,00.html

New York Times (1998):
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/29/books/more-books-fewer-editors-publishing-pressures-rise-so-errors.html

Editing is essential. There’s no question about the importance of a great editor. Not only in the ream of “copy editing” to pick up grammar and spelling and factual errors, but also in the complex art of “substantive editing” where the editor works closely with the author to shape the content and tone of the work.

Like Jon Jeremy and other commenters here, I am not convinced that every book churned from the factories of the big-name publishers is expertly edited.

I’ve found hilarious and grade-school-level gaffes in books from Random House, University presses, and self-publishers. One has a number of paragraphs repeated twice, making one wonder if anyone at the publishing house even bothered to read the book. Another — an academic critique of 19th century literature — consistently misspells Edgar “Allen” Poe. And the third gave the world a forgettable novel that began with this stirring sentence:

“His hand creeped up her thigh like a beast of pray.”

Maybe it’s better to take a lighter approach to this kind of ubiquitous grammatical meltdown. It’s amusing to find these blunders, like the sign in a hotel in Warsaw, Poland:

“This elevator is broken. You are unbearable.”

To the author of the =Survival of the Book= blog, I would ask: Is it accurate to generalize, and to claim that “All books published by big-name publishers are well edited; and all books published by small presses and by individual authors are poorly edited” ? … It seems to me that poor editing, and non-editing, is a fact of modern life that plagues books published by all publishers, great and small.

There’s a lot of schlock out there; at the same time, there are many people working in publishing — corporate publishing, University presses, and Independent publishing — who are skilled and who deeply care about their work, and are producing excellent books.

Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks

The truth is the books I’ve gotten for free from MobileRead and other places where people have lovingly scanned, captured, edited, and polished non-copyrighted works has a far lower rate of defects than the presumably professionally copyedited manuscripts in the Kindle store. I don’t know what the answer is to this. But, I believe that poo-pooing the notion that we mere mortals can produce quality work is unhelpful at best and inaccurate at worst.

I want good quality books for my dollar, but just hand-waving, “let the pros do it!” is a path to failure until the “pros” get their skills updated, learn this new medium, and start performing AT LEAST as well as we amateurs.

– Scott

As for saying that crowds are only the source of bad things like lynchings and putting people in camps, my response is that such things generally result from leaders promoting bad behavior and bad attitudes in a culture in order to oppress other groups. Leaders are very influential, and crowds that form can do good things or bad things depending on the forces manipulating them. Were those crowds with Martin Luther King Jr. doing bad things? Were crowds of good people wrong to act upon the messages of MLK?

Anyway, I think the opinions of this editor come from feeling threatened by people daring to exercise their freedom of speech. If a writer’s work is a terrible mess, the crowd probably won’t go wild over it.

Perhaps this disgruntled editor should peruse self published works worthy of editing and try to make a hit instead of poo-pooing people for having the audacity to present their creations to the world.

As an eBook publisher I’m using my freelance editor, as a writer at least I have a very good friend at hand who is professionally writing himself and who has given me a lot of valuable input on any story.

This is the least any writer should consider: Let others read your text before you publish it and take their criticism seriously.
Writing is a craft, and each work needs some polishing.

Gatekeepers are fine and necessary — when they actually do any gatekeeping. Looking at the books that are currently published, can anyone seriously suggest that they would be worse if they weren’t edited?

Writers whose work benefits financially from the application of editing skills can learn them quickly and easily. Those who can’t be bothered probably don’t have many writing skills either.

If you want an editor and can’t find one, let me know. I know lots of editors who would be glad for your work. (It won’t be me as I do not edit fiction.)

Right now, the current system is stacked against the authors; agents and publishers essentially work on commission so they are only interested in the books with great profit potential (or at least great prestige).

In the next few years, I suspect that either editors will work for hire (hired by the authors themselves) or that authors will edit each others works (I think we are already seeing some of that on sites like fiction.net).

Editors may want to be needed and useful, but if they can’t keep up with the workflow, they shouldn’t complain when writers go around them… especially in the digital world.